Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (73 page)

The Soviet system was most lethal when the Soviet Union was not at war. The Nazis, on the other hand, killed no more than a few thousand people before the war began. During the war of conquest, Germany killed millions of people faster than any state in history (to that point).
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At a great distance in time, we can choose to compare the Nazi and Soviet systems, or not. The hundreds of millions of Europeans who were touched by both regimes did not have this luxury.

The comparisons between leaders and systems began the moment that Hitler came to power. From 1933 through 1945 hundreds of millions of Europeans had to weigh what they knew about National Socialism and Stalinism as they made the decisions that would, all too often, determine their fate. This was true of unemployed German workers in early 1933, who had to decide whether they would vote for social democrats, communists, or Nazis. It was true, at the same moment, of starving Ukrainian peasants, some of whom hoped for a German invasion that might rescue them from their plight. It held for European politicians of the second half of the 1930s, who had to decide whether or not to enter Stalin’s Popular Fronts. The dilemma was felt sharply in Warsaw in these years, as Polish diplomats sought to keep an equal distance between their powerful German and Soviet neighbors in the hope of avoiding war.

When both the Germans and the Soviets invaded Poland in 1939, Polish officers had to decide to whom they would surrender, and Polish Jews (and other Polish citizens besides) whether to flee to the other occupation zone. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, some Soviet prisoners of war weighed the risks of collaboration with the Germans against the likelihood of starving to death in prisoner-of-war camps. Belarusian youth had to decide whether to join the Soviet partisans or the German police—before they were press-ganged into one or the other. Jews in Minsk in 1942 had to choose between remaining in the ghetto or fleeing to the forest to seek Soviet partisans. Polish Home Army commanders in 1944 had to decide whether or not to try to liberate Warsaw from the Germans themselves, or to wait for the Soviets. Most survivors of the Ukrainian famine of 1933 later experienced German occupation; most survivors of the German starvation camps of 1941 returned to Stalin’s Soviet Union; most survivors of the Holocaust who remained in Europe also experienced communism.

These Europeans, who inhabited the crucial part of Europe at the crucial time, were condemned to compare. We have the possibility, if we wish, to consider the two systems in isolation; people who lived under them experienced overlap and interaction. The Nazi and Soviet regimes were sometimes allies, as in the joint occupation of Poland. They sometimes held compatible goals as foes: as when Stalin chose not to aid the rebels in Warsaw in 1944, thereby allowing the Germans to kill people who would later have resisted communist rule. This is what François Furet called their “belligerent complicity.” Often the Germans and the Soviets goaded each other into escalations that cost more lives than the policies of either state by itself would have. Partisan warfare was the supreme occasion for each leader to tempt the other into further brutality. From 1942, Stalin encouraged guerrilla actions in occupied Soviet Belarus, knowing that it would bring down massive reprisals against his own citizens. Hitler welcomed the opportunity to kill “anyone who even looks at us askance.”
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During the Second World War, the bloodlands were subjected not to one invasion but to two or three, not to one occupation regime but to two or three. The mass murder of Jews began as the Germans crossed into lands that the Soviets had just annexed for themselves a matter of months before, from which they had deported tens of thousands of people just weeks before, and in which they had shot thousands of prisoners just days before. The German Einsatzgruppen were able to mobilize local anger over the murder of prisoners by the Soviet NKVD. The twenty thousand or so Jews who were killed in these orchestrated pogroms were only a very small part, fewer than one half of one percent, of the victims of the Holocaust. But precisely the overlap between Soviet and German power allowed the Nazis to propagate their own description of Bolshevism as a Jewish plot.

Other episodes of mass murder were a result of this same accumulation of Nazi and Soviet rule. In occupied Belarus, Belarusians killed other Belarusians, some of them as policemen in the German service, some of them as Soviet partisans. In occupied Ukraine, policemen fled the German service to join nationalist partisan units. These people then killed tens of thousands of Poles and fellow Ukrainians in the name of a social and national revolution. This sort of accumulation could also affect, and indeed end, the lives of millions of people who were thousands of miles away from the bloodlands. Masses of Soviet citizens fled the bloodlands to the east, to the heartland of a Soviet state that was poorly equipped to support them. Death rates in the Gulag increased drastically during the war, as a result of food shortages and logistical problems associated with the German invasion. More than half a million people died as a result, victims of the war and of both regimes.

Even so, the impact of multiple continuous occupation was most dramatic in the lands that Hitler conceded to Stalin in the secret protocol to the nonaggression pact of 1939, then took from him in the first days of the invasion of 1941, then lost to him again in 1944. Before the Second World War, these lands were: independent Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and eastern Poland. Though these states were governed by authoritarian nationalist regimes, and popular nationalism was certainly on the rise, the number of people killed either by the state or in civil strife in the 1930s was no more than a few thousand in all of these countries taken together. Under Soviet rule between 1939 and 1941, hundreds of thousands of people from this zone were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia and tens of thousands more shot. The region was the heartland of Jewish settlement in Europe, and its Jews were trapped when the Germans invaded the newly extended Soviet Union in 1941. Almost all of the Jews native to the region were killed. It was here that Ukrainian partisans ethnically cleansed Poles in 1943 before Soviet forces ethnically cleansed both Ukrainians and Poles from 1944 onward.

This zone, east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, was where the Holocaust began,
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where the Soviets twice extended their boundaries to the west. In this special strip of territory within the bloodlands, most of the NKVD persecutions of the 1940s took place, as did more than a quarter of the German killings of Jews, as did massive ethnic cleansing. Molotov-Ribbentrop Europe was a joint production of the Soviets and the Nazis.

The transformations envisioned by both Hitler and Stalin were economic, and the consequences of their economic policies were felt most painfully in the bloodlands. Though National Socialist and Stalinist ideologies were essentially different, Nazi and Soviet planners were preoccupied with certain basic economic problems, and Nazi and Soviet leaders inhabited and sought to alter the same world political economy. Ideology cannot function without economics, and economics in the time and place was very much a matter of the control of territory. Animal and human labor still moved ploughs and armies. Capital was less mobile then, and scarcer. Food was a natural resource, as were oil and minerals and precious metals. Globalization had been halted by the First World War, and free trade further hindered by the Great Depression.

From the Marxist point of view, peasant societies had no right to exist in the modern world. From the Nazi perspective, Slavic peasants (though not German farmers) were superfluous. German farmers would reclaim the fertile soil with their own sweat and the blood of others. These were ideological perspectives, of course: but like all ideologies they arose from, and spoke to, a certain understanding of economic interests. As theory became practice, Nazi colonization and Soviet self-colonization could function only when economic interests and ideological presuppositions seemed to confirm each other. Leaders, planners, and killers needed the sight of gold as well as the smell of ink. The mass killing policies of Hitler and Stalin exhibited three economic dimensions: (1) as elements of grand plans of political economic transformation; (2) as causes of the (upward and downward) modulation of mass killing policies; (3) and as plunder from below, during and after mass murder.

In Stalin’s grand plan, the collectivization of agriculture was to transform the Soviet Union into an industrial power, more or less within its present boundaries. Collectivization brought famine, which Stalin consciously directed toward Ukrainians. It also contributed to the Great Terror, which was aimed first at alienated peasants who might side with an invading foreign power. Hitler’s grand plan was more or less the reverse. He would begin with a terror abroad, destroying the people he saw as the leadership of the Soviet Union, and thus bringing down the regime. Then he would exploit collective farms to divert a grain surplus to Germany. In the long run, he would create a vast frontier empire ruled by Germans, bereft of Jews, and scantly peopled by Slavs reduced to slavery. Hitler always wanted to rid Europe of Jews. But he would never have ruled, and could never have killed, the millions of Jews of Poland, the Soviet Union, and the Baltics had he not pursued this eastern colonial vision with military force.

When Hitler and Stalin had to decide who was to bear the consequences of shortages, planned or unplanned, they also revealed ideological priorities. For Stalin, profits from grain exports in 1933 were more important than the lives of millions of peasants. He decided that peasants would die, and he decided which peasants would die in the largest numbers: the inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine. The grain that could have saved their lives was shipped south by the trainload, before their eyes, to the ports of the Black Sea. The Wehrmacht found itself holding huge numbers of Soviet soldiers as prisoners in autumn 1941. Most of them would die of starvation or related diseases. Yet even in the Dulags and the Stalags, where general killing was the rule, certain priorities were visible: Jews were shot right away, Russians and Belarusians were more likely to be left to starve, and ethnic Germans (and then Ukrainians) were more likely to be recruited for labor.

A certain amount of adaptation to circumstances is even visible in German policy toward Jews. Eliminating the Jews of Europe was Hitler’s intention all along, and killing them all was an explicit policy as of late 1941. Nevertheless, even a policy of total destruction could be adapted to the economic demands of the moment. In winter 1941, for example, the Jews of Minsk survived in order to sew winter coats and boots for the beleaguered Wehrmacht. This was obviously no humane gesture: Hitler had sent his army to war with no winter gear, and the need to keep them from freezing to death momentarily outweighed the imperative to kill Jews. Most of these Jewish laborers were later killed. In summer 1942 food supply seemed more pressing than labor supply, which became an argument for the acceleration of the policy of gassing the Jews of occupied Poland. From 1943 onward, labor seemed more important than food, and some of the surviving Jews were kept alive longer, worked to death rather than shot or gassed.

Mass killing allowed plunder and social advancement. This bound the people who profited to the regime, and sometimes to its ideology. The deportation of richer peasants in the Soviet Union in 1930 allowed for the theft of their belongings, as did the deportation of Polish elites ten years later. The Great Terror allowed younger cadres in the party to make careers after their superiors were shot or deported. The Holocaust allowed non-Jews to take Jewish apartments and houses. Of course, the regimes themselves stole. Poles and other east Europeans who took from Jews had very often lost their own property to Germans. The Polish officers at Katyn had to surrender their watches and wedding rings before they were shot. German children wore the socks of Jewish children shot in Minsk, German men the watches of Jewish men shot at Babi Yar, German women the fur coats of Jewish women shot at Maly Trastsianets.

Tsvetan Todorov has claimed that “given the goals that they set for themselves, the choices of Stalin and Hitler were, alas, rational.” This was not always true, but it was often true. Rationality in the sense he meant, which is also the narrow sense used in economics, concerns only whether one chooses the correct means to achieve an end. It has nothing to do with the end itself, with what leaders desired. Political goals must be judged separately by some ethical criterion. Discussions of rationality and irrationality cannot substitute for discussions of right and wrong. The Nazi (and Soviet) attention to economics does not morally attenuate the crimes of the regimes. If anything, it reveals the common indifference to individual human life that is as horrible as any other aspect of their rule. The modulation and the plunder are, if anything, even greater reasons for moral condemnation. Economic considerations do not displace an ideology of murderous racism. Rather, they confirm and illustrate its power.
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In colonization, ideology interacts with economics; in administration, it interacts with opportunism and fear. In both the Nazi and the Soviet cases, periods of mass murder were also periods of enthusiastic, or at least uniform, administrative performance. The closest thing to resistance from within a bureaucratic apparatus took place at the beginning of the era of mass killing, in Soviet Ukraine, among Ukrainian party activists who tried to report on the famine. They were quickly silenced by the threat of expulsion from the party, arrest, and deportation. Some of those who dared to raise doubts then became fervent campaigners for starvation. During the Great Terror of 1937-1938 and the first wave of the murder of Jews in 1941, signals from above led to killing below, and often to requests for higher quotas. The NKVD was subject to purges at the very same time. In 1941 in the western Soviet Union, SS officers, like NKVD officers a few years earlier, competed among themselves to kill more people and thus to demonstrate their competence and loyalty. Human lives were reduced to the moment of pleasure of a subordinate reporting to a superior.